Epistemology of Mind

This course of lectures investigates how it is that we come to have knowledge of our own minds. It’s often been though that we come by that knowledge in ways that are distinct from how we learn about the rest of the world, or the mental states of others. For instance, it can seem as though we have peculiar authority over our own mental states, that we can access them directly, and that we enjoy a particular position of epistemic privilege, relative to others, when we report on our own mental states. This lecture course scrutinizes those and other related claims. (The suggested readings are for the most part taken from the faculty reading list. The full faculty reading list is available here).

In the first four lectures, we think about the ways in which we gain knowledge of our own minds, and how this differs (if at all) from the way in which we gain knowledge of others minds. In the last two we raise questions about the nature of first person thought, and ask whether first person ascriptions are immune to error through misidentification, as has sometimes been thought to be the case.

The 1994 volume Self-Knowledge edited by Quassam Cassim and listed on the faculty reading list has many helpful articles in it, but be aware that it doesn't include more recent work in the area.

For an overview of work on self-knowledge, I recommend Brie Gertler's (2011) book Self-Knowledge.

1. Self-knowledge: inner sense views

In this lecture we start thinking about the topic of self-knowledge, and look in particular at accounts that you do something like perceive your own mental states, through a special kind of inner sense.

Suggested reading:

Armstrong, D. M. (1994). Introspection. In Quassim Cassam (ed.), Self-Knowledge. Oxford University Press. pp. 109--117.
Shoemaker, Sydney (1986). Introspection and the self. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 10 (1):101-120.
Kind, Amy, (2003), “Shoemaker, Self-Blindness, and Moore’s Paradox”, Philosophical Quarterly, 53: 39–48.

Lecture notes available here as a word document and here as a pdf.

2. Self-knowledge: acquaintance and transparency

Responding to the difficulties we ran into with inner sense views of self-knowledge, we consider some alternative views, one on which you are directly acquainted with your own mental states, and one on which your mental states are transparent: you learn about them through learning about the world. This investigation forces us to think a bit more about what the objects of introspection are: are they just mental states, or do we also introspect on something like a self? What really is that?

Suggested reading:

Evans, Gareth (1994). Self-Identification. In Quassim Cassam (ed.), Self-Knowledge. Oxford University Press.
Gertler, Brie (2011). Self-Knowledge and the Transparency of Belief. In Anthony Hatzimoysis (ed.), Self-Knowledge. Oxford University Press.

Lecture notes available here as word document and here as PDF.

3. Privileged access?

In this lecture we interrogate the assumption that has guided much of the previous discussion, namely that we do have privileged access to our own minds, and that introspection is a reliable guide to our own mental states. We look at reasons to be skeptical of those claims, and try our hand at introspecting our own mental states

Suggested reading:

Schwitzgebel, Eric. The Unreliability of Naive Introspection. The Philosophical Review 1 April 2008; 117 (2): 245–273.
Byrne, Alex (2005) ‘Introspection’. Philosophical Topics 33: 79-104.
Williamson, Timothy. (2002) Knowledge and its Limits Chapter 4 Anti-Luminosi

Lecture notes available here as word document and here as PDF.

4. Behaviourism and other minds N.b. in Lent 2020 lecture 4 will be given after lectures 5 and 6

So far, we’ve assumed that your access to your own thoughts is different to your access to others. In this lecture we interrogate that assumption. Do you access your own thoughts in a way that is fundamentally different to the way in which you access others’ thoughts, or are there commonalities between these methods? Do you sometimes (or always?) read off your own mental states via inferences from your behavior? We’ll take a brief look at some work in cognitive psychology that bears on this question.

Suggested reading:

Gopnik, A. and H. Wellman, 1994, “The Theory Theory”, in L. Hirschfield and S. Gelman (eds.), Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 257–93.
Carruthers, P. (2009). How we know our own minds: The relationship between mindreading and metacognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32(2), 121-138.

5. First person thought and talk

Is first person talk and thought (thoughts that involve the term “I” for instance) reducible to non-first personal talk and thought, or is there something irreducibly special about it? If so, what is that?

Suggested reading:

*Perry, John, 'The Problem of the Essential Indexical', Noûs, 13, no. 1 (1979): 3-21.
*Lewis, David, , 'Attitudes De Dicto and De Se', Philosophical Review, 88, no. 4 (1979): 513-43.
Frege, Gottlob, 'Thoughts', in his Collected Papers (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), pp. 351-72.
Evans, Gareth, 'Self-Identification', in Q. Cassam, ed., Self-Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 184-209 'Essay 6'. This is a reprint of chapter 6 of his The Varieties

Lecture notes available here as word document and here as PDF

6. Immunity to error through misidentification

Are your first-person thoughts immune to error through misidentification? Can you be mistaken that it is you who is in pain, rather than someone else? If so, what does that feature of first-person thought reveal about the mind more generally? We’ll look at classic literature on this question and also ask whether more recent work in psychiatry can helpfully bear on the questions at issue.

Suggested reading:

Coliva, Annalisa (2006). Error Through Misidentification: Some Varieties. Journal of Philosophy 103 (8):403-425.
Campbell, John (1999). Immunity to error through misidentification and the meaning of a referring term. Philosophical Topics 26 (1/2):89-104.
Evans, G. 1982. “Self-Identification.” In his The Varieties of Reference (edited by J. McDowell). Oxford: Oxford UP.
Shoemaker, S. 1968. “Self-Reference and Self-Awareness.” Journal of Philosophy 65: 555-567.

Lecture notes available here as a word document and here as a PDF